European knockout ties - away leg first or second?

I noticed Wenger's comments recently regarding him having to change his whole way of thinking for the Moscow tie because the previous 2 matches Arsenal played the first leg away first.

Back in the day a manager's preference was always to play away first because 'you had a better idea of what you needed to do back at home'. That's fair enough but the same applies the other way around. And I understand that if the tie goes to extra time/ penalties it's an advantage to have that at your own ground.

But look at the City/ Liverpool tie. Liverpool by not conceding an away goal are effectively 1 goal away from killing off the tie completely. They might not even need that.

I think there is a huge upside to getting the home leg out of the way, knowing after 90 minutes that you cannot possibly concede any further away goals in the tie. Look at United v Porto in 2004, we got stung that year and Sevilla this year another example.

Is it still the case that everyone prefers the second leg at home or is there more of an argument these days that it can work both ways?

Actual scientific research was done regarding this and the result was that it has little impact on the outcome. The researchers expected that the teams playing the second leg at home would have an advantage but they found no evidence for it once they controlled for actual team quality.

I noticed Wenger's comments recently regarding him having to change his whole way of thinking for the Moscow tie because the previous 2 matches Arsenal played the first leg away first.

Back in the day a manager's preference was always to play away first because 'you had a better idea of what you needed to do back at home'. That's fair enough but the same applies the other way around. And I understand that if the tie goes to extra time/ penalties it's an advantage to have that at your own ground.

But look at the City/ Liverpool tie. Liverpool by not conceding an away goal are effectively 1 goal away from killing off the tie completely. They might not even need that.

I think there is a huge upside to getting the home leg out of the way, knowing after 90 minutes that you cannot possibly concede any further away goals in the tie. Look at United v Porto in 2004, we got stung that year and Sevilla this year another example.

Is it still the case that everyone prefers the second leg at home or is there more of an argument these days that it can work both ways?

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Same with us against Sevilla really, they knew that scoring 1 goal would give them a massive advantage. We looked scared all game that it might happen, that fear froze us IMO.

Jose should have gone for the throat much more in that game, even if we lost 2-1 I think we would have gone through knowing we had the away goal.

I noticed Wenger's comments recently regarding him having to change his whole way of thinking for the Moscow tie because the previous 2 matches Arsenal played the first leg away first.

Back in the day a manager's preference was always to play away first because 'you had a better idea of what you needed to do back at home'. That's fair enough but the same applies the other way around. And I understand that if the tie goes to extra time/ penalties it's an advantage to have that at your own ground.

But look at the City/ Liverpool tie. Liverpool by not conceding an away goal are effectively 1 goal away from killing off the tie completely. They might not even need that.

I think there is a huge upside to getting the home leg out of the way, knowing after 90 minutes that you cannot possibly concede any further away goals in the tie. Look at United v Porto in 2004, we got stung that year and Sevilla this year another example.

Is it still the case that everyone prefers the second leg at home or is there more of an argument these days that it can work both ways?

I think the advantage of home/away coming first changes completely after the first leg. If you don't get an away goal in the first leg; you're risking it for the second; equally if you don't win at home in the first leg, you've got to get a result away.
So basically it doesn't really matter.

I think it's mainly psychological since fans always convince themselves "even if we get a bad result in the first leg, we can turn it around in the second leg because we're at home". It's harder to overturn a deficit away from home if you couldn't even get a result in the first leg at home.

Losing 2-1 away from home - "no problem, a 1-0 win is enough, we'll take care of that at home"
Losing 1-2 at home - "feck, we need to score at least two goals at their place to advance now"